Embracing the Word
Pentecost 19 Proper 24
October 16, 2022
Fr. Tim Nunez
Last week, I was studying the readings for this Sunday and I honed in on this sentence from the passage from the second letter of Paul to Timothy:
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16-17)
As it happens, and I love such coincidences, I was meeting a colleague and his family for lunch on Thursday. As I approached them, I saw that the dad, who is a priest, was in an intense conversation with his son who happens to be named Timothy. I asked, “what are you talking about?” They looked a little awkward for a moment, then said “Leviticus.” Tim was trying to figure out how that book of law fit in with his faith in Christ.
This famous sentence, and Tim’s question about Leviticus, raises a number of lines of inquiry, particularly as to why we read the Holy Scriptures and how we should deal with them when we do. Surely a number of you read the Bible regularly. Some may depend on what they hear each week during the service, which is a good bit, and others may not be very familiar with it.
Clearly Paul is referring to the Hebrew scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, which Timothy learned from his mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois, as was typical for Jewish children including Paul himself. Paul notes that these scriptures prepared Timothy for salvation in Christ Jesus, just as they had prepared him. In that sense he’s underscoring why we don’t bypass the Old Testament. Having some familiarity with the scripture Jesus fulfills is helpful in understanding his importance to the world.
And we can surely extend the idea to the New Testament as well, since those writings were embraced by the community of faith as the vital witness to Jesus’ life among us and his ongoing life in the Church.
We will start with what the Bible is not, or not merely. It is not merely a rulebook that gives us a long list of do’s and don’ts although it does contain hundreds of commandments, rules and regulations. It is not a book of myths and legends, although it does contain stories and parables, metaphors and symbolic language that contain deep truths far beyond their factual bases.
What is it, then? The Bible, as Paul notes, is a set of books or writings inspired by God. The literal wording here is God-breathed or God-spirited. We hold that God inspired it by in-spiriting the writers, the editors, the community in sorting out which oral stories needed to be preserved in writing, which scrolls to hold as sacred, and that the translations would faithfully impart them to cultures around the world – including ours. That is why we refer to it as God’s written Word. And it starts with the testimony to One God, the ultimate truth upholding the very idea of truth.
As such, as Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote in a collect we will see in a month, we are to, “read, mark and inwardly digest” the Holy Scriptures. (Proper 28 p. 326 BCP) Scripture just means “writing.” We do that for very important reasons that I’ll divide into two categories. First, we find ideas that are so important they are foundational to our very understanding of our very being, how we are to live and God’s ultimate plan.
For example, we hold in our culture today as a bedrock principle the essential and intrinsic value of every human being. This undergirds our sense of justice, the idea of human rights, of fairness and community responsibility. It is rooted in Genesis 1:27, So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
That means no matter how rich or poor you are, your race, culture or religion, your background and mistakes, abilities and challenges and so on, you have fundamental rights as a human being made in God’s image.
It is so foundational that it would be easy for us to assume it just is. But it is not for a disarmingly large portion of the world. The whole notion of human rights doesn’t exist in many cultures or gets been scrubbed out by ideologies like Marxism or Nazism.
But we need not go to that extreme. I listened to a podcast this week in which a man living in the secularized UK described how after the birth of his first child, a son with Down Syndrome, people repeatedly assumed that had he and his wife known, they would have surely terminated the pregnancy – and said that to him as though it were normal and not at all offensive. “…in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
We ascribe this truth to God. It isn’t up for a vote and it’s true no matter if they killed every one of us who believe it.
Another is the root of Christian ethics, the foundation for how we should regard and treat each other, “…love thy neighbor as thyself.” We recognize that as the second half of Jesus’ summary of the Law. But remember he is quoting Leviticus 19:18 which reads in full, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”
Using the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus explains that “neighbor” is any human being God brings to our attention, again regardless of cultural differences and so on. Human rights include human responsibilities. It is absolute, inarguable, yet we struggle with it, even within our families. And we should acknowledge that a lot of the world simply doesn’t know it and/or doesn’t buy it and/or simply doesn’t care.
Those are two big ideas, but you know there are many others, most especially our witness to Jesus himself and what he says and does about judgment, repentance, mercy, forgiveness and grace. All of that takes on ultimate importance because of who Jesus is, a real person, documented in history. His truth is affirmed not only in the testimony provided by his Apostles but in the ongoing life of the Church and the progress of those principles across the millennia.
Our responsibility for engaging scripture falls into two categories. First, as individuals we are to engage them. Just as Jacob met The Lord at Pineal and wrestled with him all night, not letting go no matter what. God put Jacob’s hip out of joint, which I gather can be rather painful, yet still he would not let go. We wrestle with God through persistent prayer, as attested in our Gospel passage, and in engaging God’s written Word through study.
Second, as a church, we exist to carry and manifest this witness in our place and time. Good Shepherd has faithfully done that here for almost 100 years. I’m reminded that Katy Gukich was raised to know God’s Word here from the start, taught it here for decades and now her great grandchildren are learning it here just as Lois and Eunice taught it to Timothy.
Next Sunday we will pass out pledge cards as we prepare our budget for next year. There is a lot of uncertainty about the economy generally, supply chains and inflation and interest rates are worrisome, the stock market is turbulent and our citrus industry is facing its greatest challenges ever.
We will stick to our mission, To Convey the Good News of Jesus Christ, to grow in our knowledge and love of God through him, to empower and equip the men and women and children of this church for ministry, and to thereby be a light to this community and the world of Jesus Christ in all his Glory.
All of it grounded faithfully in God’s Word.
AMEN